New research from the University of Alabama at Birmingham identifies an epigenetic cause for why patients with temporal lobe epilepsy tend to have memory loss, and suggests a potential way to reverse that loss. The findings, ...

One look at Sardinia's white-sand beaches and turquoise water would lead you to assume that this part of the world is devoted entirely to idyllic getaways and sun-filled vacations. You'd never guess that the island's population ...

Around-the-clock rhythms guide nearly all physiological processes in animals and plants. Each cell in the body contains special proteins that act on one another in interlocking feedback loops to generate near-24 hour oscillations ...

The advent of online social networks has led to the rapid development of tools for understanding the interactions between members of the network, their activity, the connections, the hubs and nodes. But, any relationships ...

Researchers at the University of Toronto (U of T) have uncovered new insights on the genetic causes of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), which is also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. These findings could uncover a new way ...

When it comes to diagnosing substance abuse, health care professionals are mainly limited to relying on patient honesty. But a new study aims to find the genetic causes of addiction, which could lead to a more nuanced way ...

Senescence, a phenomenon in which cells cease to divide and grow, can be caused by everything from natural DNA damage to treatment with chemotherapy. However, several mechanisms allow for cells to bypass senescence and grow ...

(HealthDay)—Targeted radiation in the treatment of brain metastases leads to less cognitive damage than radiation for the entire brain, while survival is similar, researchers reported Sunday at the annual meeting of the ...

People with achromatopsia, an inherited eye disorder, see the world literally in black and white. Worse yet, their extreme sensitivity to light makes them nearly blind in bright sunlight. Now, researchers at University of ...

Gene

A gene is the basic unit of heredity in a living organism. All living things depend on genes. Genes hold the information to build and maintain their cells and pass genetic traits to offspring. A modern working definition of a gene is "a locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, which is associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions, and or other functional sequence regions " . In common usage, the term gene often refers to what is known more accurately as an allele.

The notion of a gene has evolved with the science of genetics, which began when Gregor Mendel noticed that biological variations are inherited from parent organisms as specific, discrete traits. The biological entity responsible for defining traits was termed a gene, but the biological basis for inheritance remained unknown until DNA was identified as the genetic material in the 1940s. All organisms have many genes corresponding to many different biological traits, some of which are immediately visible, such as eye color or number of limbs, and some of which are not, such as blood type or increased risk for specific diseases, or the thousands of basic biochemical processes that comprise life.

In cells, a gene is a portion of DNA that contains both "coding" sequences that determine what the gene does, and "non-coding" sequences that determine when the gene is active (expressed). When a gene is active, the coding and non-coding sequences are copied in a process called transcription, producing an RNA copy of the gene's information. This piece of RNA can then direct the synthesis of proteins via the genetic code. In other cases, the RNA is used directly, for example as part of the ribosome. The molecules resulting from gene expression, whether RNA or protein, are known as gene products, and are responsible for the development and functioning of all living things.

In more technical terms, a gene is a locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, and is associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions and/or other functional sequence regions. The physical development and phenotype of organisms can be thought of as a product of genes interacting with each other and with the environment. A concise definition of a gene, taking into account complex patterns of regulation and transcription, genic conservation and non-coding RNA genes, has been proposed by Gerstein et al.: "A gene is a union of genomic sequences encoding a coherent set of potentially overlapping functional products".